Part-Whole Art

2nd National Salon of Folk Art 2023

The Salon of Applied Arts and Design of 2017 titled All Around Us and the Salon of Folk Art of 2018 titled Hand/Craft/Art demonstrated to many of us that high-quality craftsmanship could constitute the link between these two artistic fields. One of the important themes of the former for me was the problem of artificial intelligence, which threatens the very basis of our civilisation, including the creative work of the hand, and the issue of increasing robotisation driven by it. We also organised a conference on the present and future of applied arts in the Kunsthalle Budapest, together with the Hungarian Academy of Art Institute of Art Theory and Methodology.

Several speakers addressed the issue of preserving the traditions of handicraft. I myself referred to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory, also quoted by Mihály Vetró, the main curator of the 2nd Salon of Folk Art held this year: “Behind the evolution of culture lies the need to develop increasingly complex skills and to maintain a constant level of pleasure [...] This will pave the way for our as yet only imagined descendants, who will be wiser and more sophisticated than we are.” ⁰¹ The curators of the salon, from Vetró to István Kolozsvári, are also part of this process.

One of the guiding principles of our work in planning the following year’s Salon of Folk Art, and the main theme of my introduction at the time, titled Sample, was the process of comprehensive research on folk culture, and I called for its representation in the exhibition, since I do not think its current representation is strong enough. The concept of the themes of the salons has been further refined in the light of the lessons learned from the previous ones and over the past five years, and I am pleased to see that the preparations for the present Salon of Folk Art are even more in line with this objective.

Getting acquainted with a philosophical theory parallel to Csíkszentmihályi’s psychology, mediated by Ken Wilber’s book A Brief History of Everything on the scale of creation/evolution also meant a lot to me. His concept finds its way through the labyrinth of the oriental and western approach to life, analysing the differences between their approaches.⁰² The work is a thesaurus of ideas summarising the system of cosmos-microcosmos. Indeed, the modern man from the Orient, even in the current era of the highest technologies, still keeps his traditions and folk art as an important part of his identity. Wilber starts his analysis with the notion of common patterns that can be interpreted in many different ways. He synthesises twenty patterns into a theory. In the first, he refers to Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler, who introduced the concept of the holon. Wilber goes on to refer to entities that are whole but at the same time are also parts of another whole. Part-wholes, holons. Just like in creation.

As an explanation, Wilber relates a funny myth about a king who goes to the famous scientist and asks him “why does the earth not fall?” The “sage” replies, “Because it stands on a lion.” The king: “And why doesn’t the lion fall?” “Because it stands on an elephant.” “And what is the elephant standing on?” “On a tortoise, but your majesty, ask no further, for there are tortoises all the way down.” No matter how far down we go, we will always find more holons. In other words, reality is not made up of things and processes, but of part-wholes, holons. A subatomic particle, a cell or a symbol, an image or a concept are all holons. Following the scientist’s patterns, the human sphere, human symbols, human activity are all systems in which folk culture/art represents the tortoises of the tale. They contain the ancestors, but also the upper holons of future knowledge.

The three main rooms of this year’s Salon are also actually holons. The first, the Inheritance Room, curated by István Kolozsvári, is based on the Nádudvar method. Families represent layers of time, the technical/artistic knowledge, while the traditions passed down in them are preserved by dynasties.

Vetró and his fellow curators emphasise the perspective of the transposition into new part-wholes, which Gábor Lükő retrieved eighty years ago in his Shapes of the Hungarian Soul. To use the Wilberian terminus technicus, there is a duality at work in man: one is the nature of the part, the other the nature of the whole. As a prisoner of reductions, modern man has forgotten the maintenance of this dual unity, but the most accomplished masters of folk art still understand and continue to practice it.

The second main exhibition room, named “Leaves With Pearls”, explores the relationship between part and whole focusing on the artist, be it a folk artist or a collaborator. My generation - and several generations since – were and have only been exposed to Gábor Pap’s lectures when vthey left the formal educational establishment. The Kunsthalle Budapest and the audience of the Salon now enjoy the privilege of having this space composed around the ideas of Gábor Pap, which have long been classified as scientific apocrypha. It was inspired by the legendary exhibition in Kecskemét of 1977 titled In the Spirit of Folk Art.⁰³ The curators selected works by our contemporaries who have been deeply influenced by folk art - people who did not accept that folk art was a superstructure tied to the socio-economic foundations that define it, but who rather decided to build on its heritage.

The catalogue of the Kecskemét exhibition has a work by Dezső Korniss titled Felt cloak pattern on the front cover and a work of Pál Deim, Szentendre Town Hall on the back cover. Now I interpret this earlier exhibition with Ken Wilber: “So holons not only have the capacity to act as wholes, but together with the other parts they are also included in another whole (participation). If they fail in either their capacity to act or their capacity to participate, they simply cease to exist. They are finished.”⁰⁴ This resonates well with Gábor Pap’s vision, his determined, action-oriented agenda.

In 1977 Gábor Pap wrote with a lot of irony and great courage: “The fate of folk art [...] is nowadays fortunately being returned to the hands of those from whom (then necessarily) it was temporarily taken in a given historical phase of the differentiation of society: the creators.”⁰⁵ I would like to highlight some of the artists of the exhibition, which at that time featured over a hundred contemporary works in seven different genres: Miklós Halmy, Ilona Keserü, Dezső Korniss, Ferenc Lantos, Ferenc Martyn, Menyhért Tóth, Pál Deim, Márta Honty, Pál Kő, Géza Samu, Márta Nagy, András Szunyoghy and József Kótai. Several of their works will be on display in the second room of this exhibition as well.

The third room was named Thirty-three, curated by Gabriella Igyártó, who has been a prominent figure of the movement bringing young folk artists together and of folk art education for decades. The symbolic number marking the Jesus Year also indicates the number of young artists exhibited.

The coordination of instrument makers, musical parts and support programmes is a credit to the work of Béla Szerényi, a performer and instrument maker who leads the oldest workshop of folk music education in Hungary.

In the two lateral rooms, in the part-whole sense of the already mentioned continuity and transitions, folk art film works – as selected by Zoltán Rockenbauer – add extra value to this year’s salon by going even further back in time. A photography exhibition, curated by Zsuzsanna Tulipán, which focuses on the creative man and his work as a craftsman in the present, promising a future through the emerging family scale micro-farming business, closes the exhibition space of the salon. I would like to express my gratitude to the curators for their dedicated work.

I would like to thank Júlia Szerdahelyi, the organiser and our team of assistants, Tamás Dévényi, the architect who designed the visuals, and Lajos Csontó, the graphic designer. Many thanks to the exhibitors, and to the Hungarian Academy of Arts for their support.

György Szegő DLA

artristic director of Kunsthalle Budapest

Footnotes:

⁰¹ Mihály Csíkszentmihályi: Flow – Az áramlat. A tökéletes élmény pszichológiája. Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997.

⁰² Ken Wilber: A Brief History of Everything. Shambala, Boston, 1996. Hungarian version: A Működő Szellem rövid története. Ursus Libris, 2003.

⁰³ Gábor Pap: A folklorizmustól az élő népművészetig. Kecskemét. 1976. Exhibition catalogue

⁰⁴ see footnote No. 2

⁰⁵ see footnote No. 3